From: Bennett Oprysa 
Sent: Monday, 27 January 2003 12:15 AM
To: Jo Lim
Subject: Transfer Policy comments

Jo,

Requiring an email confirmation from the registrant contact for all 
transfers achieves no real benefit to anyone other than Melbourne IT. 
The current rate of transfers away from Melbourne IT is far too low 
for a healthy and competitive industry. This is not because they 
have a better product, it is simply because of the overly restrictive 
transfer policy. Numerous resellers have looked at selecting a new 
registrar due to better pricing and service levels, only to give up 
in frustration when they realise the amount of work involved in 
getting their clients to transfer/renew their domains.

We also have numerous resellers that have chosen to put new registrations 
through us, but continue to renew their .au domains through Melbourne IT 
because it's so much easier.

The main obstacle is the required email to and from the registrant contact, 
the obvious solution is to allow domain transfers to be authorised by 
simply providing the domain password. If a person has the domain password, 
they essentially have full control over the domain already, the choice 
of who they renew their domain with would be one of the least significant 
actions they could take for that domain.

The other major obstacle is the innability to transfer without renewing 
or to transfer at any time and have the 2 years added to the current 
expiry date. This restriction is again of no benefit to anyone and must 
be dropped. Our preferrance is to simply increase the window where a 
transfer can be done without loss of registration time from the current 
90 days to 18 months. This would allow registrants the freedom to choose a 
new registrar anytime after the first 6 months, and would be much closer 
to gTLD procedures. It also prevents the licence from ever being valid for 
more than 3 &1/2 years, ie repeated transfers won't result in a licence 
valid for 10 years.


Bennett Oprysa
Chief Operations Officer
Enetica Pty Ltd